Just walking while black is still perceived as a crime in San Diego

Two days after the captured-on-video murder of unarmed black man Walter Scott by white South Carolina police officer Michael Slager, my friend's black teenaged son dared to walk through his Scripps Ranch neighborhood. The nerve.

In his own community, the teenager was "stalked and followed" by a white woman in a car who threatened to call the police.

My friend agonized about her son's experience on Facebook: "The stalking was so obvious and for a long distance. He attempted to take a picture of her license plate but it only seemed to aggravate her more until, fearing for his safety, he found some bushes to hide in."

The woman eventually drove away, but not before she clutched her pearls and circled, making a solid attempt to find that menacing black man walking down her street.

"I am writing this," my friend finished her post, "because I am tired of having to speak in small, safe circles about the incidents that happen to us, especially in San Diego. I am tired of people with 'good intentions' being shocked it doesn't just happen to 'those kids,' or trying to deny our experiences. I am mostly tired of trying to keep my cool after these things happen because there are people who are so privileged they do NOT have to think everyday about strategies to keep their kids safe and alive from would be vigilantes and law enforcement."

For those wishing to be allies to people of color, rather than giving in to white fragility—a defensive response to race dialogue—I invite you to sit with those sentiments for a minute. Re-read them. Percolate on 'em instead of yeah, but-ing them to avoid discomfort. Discomfort, I would argue, is the sustained state for black people in 'Merica. The micro-aggressions start early and have no end.

The lived experience(s) as shared by my friend elicited many supportive responses. But given the news of the previous day and the previous weeks (and months and years and decades), I was nonplussed when one distraught and sympathetic white commenter suggested that her son file a police report or try to get a restraining order.

And though it isn't in the same hemisphere of delusional, it is nevertheless a distant cousin to the ignorance of Mary Ann Twitty, the former Ferguson, Missouri, court clerk who sent racist emails, not because she's racist (because she's totally not; she recommended two black women for jobs if you need proof), but because they were jokes.

Twitty was fired, an injustice in her no-peripheral-vision eyes that leveled her. "It took me awhile [sic] to get over the feeling of being raped," she said. At which point I Linda Blair-ed again. Damn if my neck isn't starting to ache as much as my broken heart.

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